A novel formal theory of concurrent systems that does not assume any atomic operations is introduced. The execution of a concurrent program is modeled as an abstract set of operation executions with two temporal ordering relations: “precedence” and “can causally affect”. A primitive interprocess communication mechanism is then defined. In Part II, the mutual exclusion is expressed precisely in terms of this model, and solutions using the communication mechanism are given.
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Leslie Lamport (1986) studied this question.
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